I just bought a new cell phone, an LG 6100, which I use with Verizon’s service. I tried activating the web access on my old phone, a Motorola vc120, which I wrote a blog entry about around six months ago. I concluded at the time that it wasn’t very useful. My new phone, however, has a bigger screen with color and WAP 2.0 support. This time around, I’m a lot more impressed.

Specifically, the killer-app, for me, is weather radar on the color screen. That’s genuinely useful. There are various sources of weather data formatted for cell phone usage, including several on Verizon’s menu, the best of which is probably Accuweather, which offers limited but better-than-nothing animated radar loops as well as satellite images. My overall favorite weather site is Weather Underground, which offers a cell-phone page with conditions, a radar still, and the forecast all in one page. I’ve tried WxServer, a pilot-oriented weather site for phones, and while I think it’s a very good service, those of us who are not pilots will probably not be able to justify the fee for just the weather information. The airport information might be very useful for pilots who do a lot of cross-country flying.

There is other fun to be had. The Onion has a mobile page. Flickr has a WAP interface to your contacts’ pictures, comments on your pictures, and more, which is a great time (and airtime) waster. There are gateways to post to LiveJournal. My phone has T9 text entry, which makes things like Livejournal posts tolerably painful.

The browser is really slow and unresponsive. Expect to wait a while after hitting the scrolling buttons. Even the backlight doesn’t brighten immediately upon a button press. I haven’t found any way to bookmark sites by navigating to them and then selecting some sort of “add bookmark” option, the way all browsers on the desktop operate. Instead you have to record the URL somewhere and painfully type it in manually on the keypad, or possibly add it using a regular browser on a regular computer, if you can figure out how to log in and do that. Verizon’s whole user interface approach to their “portal” seems to be airtime-maximization rather than customer-satisfaction, as you’d expect from a phone company. The tiny screen and limited browser still make ordinary web sites mostly unusable—only phone-specific sites are really usable. If anything, the color screen and WAP 2 make that problem worse than on the old phone, because it will try to render the colored sidebars and such that decorate web sites but which are entirely unusable on the tiny screen. The browser will crash from time to time, occasionally requiring pulling the battery to reset the phone, which (so for) has been non-destructive to the phone’s configuration settings and stored information.

Overall, I think it’s a useful service, and this time I plan to keep it enabled. The weather information is what justifies the fee, and there is plenty of goofy entertainment available as well. I’ve signed up for a package of web access and 500 text messages per month for $8/month. Weather Underground can send severe weather alerts by text message, and Hz.com can send TAFs and METARs, among other things, via text messages, so that feature is useful, too.